--- title: Negativity bias url: https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/negativity-bias/ description: People give more attention and weight to bad news, threats and losses than to good news, safety and gains of the same size. section: Learn --- ![Illustration: a First World War field-intelligence collage of trench maps, wireless transmission logs and aerial reconnaissance photographs.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-wwi.jpg) [Learn](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/) · Cognitive biases and heuristics # Negativity bias In brief Bad news, threats and losses draw more attention and weight than equal-sized good news, a strongly supported asymmetry, though getting noticed is not the same as persuading and any payoff in votes is far less certain. On this page - [In brief](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/negativity-bias/#in-brief) - [What the research shows](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/negativity-bias/#what-the-research-shows) - [Has it held up?](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/negativity-bias/#has-it-held-up) - [How it shows up in political messaging](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/negativity-bias/#how-it-shows-up-in-political-messaging) - [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/negativity-bias/#how-to-spot-it) - [Persuasion or manipulation?](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/negativity-bias/#persuasion-or-manipulation) - [Archive techniques that lean on this](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/negativity-bias/#archive-techniques-that-lean-on-this) - [Related topics](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/negativity-bias/#related-topics) - [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/negativity-bias/#sources) - [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/negativity-bias/#images) On this page *Area: [Cognitive biases and heuristics](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/cognitive-biases/) · Evidence:**strong**([How we rate the evidence](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/evidence-ratings/)). Negative information reliably draws more attention and weight than positive, though its payoff in winning votes is far less certain.* ## In brief People give more attention and weight to bad news, threats and losses than to good news, safety and gains of the same size. A single negative fact about a candidate, a product or a group can outweigh several positive ones. Political messages that lead with danger, failure or an enemy draw on this asymmetry to get noticed and remembered, although being noticed is not the same as persuading. ## What the research shows Two 2001 reviews established the idea. Baumeister and colleagues surveyed evidence from many areas of psychology under the title "Bad is stronger than good" [1]. Across close relationships, feedback, learning, first impressions and major life events, bad experiences had larger and longer-lasting effects than comparable good ones, and bad information was processed more thoroughly. Rozin and Royzman proposed a general negativity bias in humans and animals and broke it into parts [2]. Negative events are more potent than equal positive ones, they loom larger as they get closer, they dominate when mixed with positive ones (one cockroach spoils a bowl of cherries, but one cherry does not redeem a bowl of cockroaches), and people draw finer distinctions among negative states than positive ones. Later work measured the effect in news. Soroka, Fournier and Nir showed people in 17 countries on six continents a series of real news stories while recording skin conductance and heart rate, which track arousal and attention [3]. Averaged across the whole sample, negative stories produced stronger physiological reactions than positive ones, and the pattern appeared around the world rather than in one culture. They also found wide differences between individuals: some people reacted more to positive stories. Robertson and colleagues analyzed tens of thousands of headline experiments run by the news site Upworthy, in which different headlines for the same story were randomly shown to readers [4]. Negative words in a headline increased the rate at which people clicked, and positive words decreased it. For an average-length headline, each additional negative word raised the click-through rate by about 2.3 percent. The effect is modest per word but large at the scale of millions of readers. In political communication specifically, Rathje, Van Bavel and van der Linden examined about 2.7 million posts by news outlets and members of the US Congress on Facebook and Twitter [5]. Posts about the political out-group were shared about twice as often as posts about the in-group. Words referring to the opposing side were the strongest predictor of sharing, for liberal and conservative accounts alike. ## Has it held up? The core finding, that negative information captures more attention and weight, has held up across many methods, countries and decades. The 2001 reviews are narrative rather than formal meta-analyses, so the claim that "bad is stronger" everywhere is broader than any single test, but newer large-sample and experimental studies such as [3] and [4] support the central point. Two extensions are much weaker. First, attention does not reliably translate into votes. Lau, Sigelman and Rovner's meta-analysis of the negative-campaigning literature found that attack messages are more memorable and can raise knowledge about a campaign, but found no reliable evidence that they win more votes than positive messages, and no consistent evidence that they depress turnout [6]. Second, the claim that conservatives have a stronger negativity bias than liberals is contested. Hibbing, Smith and Alford argued that differences in physiological and psychological responses to negative stimuli underlie differences in political ideology [7]. The physiological part of this work has not replicated well: Bakker and colleagues ran preregistered replications in the United States and the Netherlands and found that conservatives and liberals did not differ in skin-conductance responses to threatening images [8]. Individual differences in negativity exist, as Soroka's data show, but they do not map neatly onto left and right. ## How it shows up in political messaging - **World War I recruitment and war-bond posters.** Both sides led with threat. The US Army's [Destroy This Mad Brute — Enlist](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/destroy-this-mad-brute-1917/) made the enemy a monster carrying off a woman, and Britain's [Remember Belgium — Enlist To-Day](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/remember-belgium-1915/) showed civilians fleeing a burning village. These posters used negative imagery to demand attention before making their request. **Content note:** Dehumanizing caricature of Germans as an ape, implied sexual violence and partial nudity. This object is shown as it was published. [Why](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/#as-it-was) ![U.S. Army recruiting poster of an ape in a German helmet carrying a woman](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/destroy-this-mad-brute-1917.jpg) *"Destroy This Mad Brute: Enlist," U.S. Army recruiting poster by Harry R. Hopps, 1917. From the FRAME gallery: [Destroy This Mad Brute — Enlist](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/destroy-this-mad-brute-1917/)* ![German poster of bombers over burning industrial plants under the title Was England will!](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/was-england-will-1918.jpg) *"Was England will!" (What England Wants!), German home-front poster by Egon Tschirch, 1918, quoting a British labour leader's call in the*Daily Telegraph*to bomb the Rhineland industrial regions. From the FRAME gallery: [Was England will! (What England Wants!)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/was-england-will-1918/)* - **Television attack ads in the United States.** Lyndon Johnson's 1964 "Daisy" ad, which cut from a girl counting flower petals to a nuclear explosion, and George H. W. Bush's 1988 "Revolving Door" ad, which showed prisoners walking through a turnstile to attack Michael Dukakis's record on prison furloughs, are two of the best-known negative ads from each party [9]. Both are remembered decades later, which fits the meta-analytic finding that negativity is memorable even where its electoral effect is unclear [6]. ![Frame from the 1964 Johnson campaign advertisement showing a girl pulling petals from a daisy](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/daisy-ad-1964.jpg) *Frame from "Peace, Little Girl" ("Daisy"), Lyndon B. Johnson presidential campaign, broadcast 7 September 1964. From the FRAME gallery: [Peace, Little Girl ("Daisy")](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/daisy-ad-1964/)* - **Public health campaigns.** The US Food and Drug Administration's anti-smoking campaign [The Real Cost — "Your Skin"](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/real-cost-your-skin-2014/) showed a teenager's skin peeling away. Government health messaging frequently frames risks as vivid losses to cut through competing messages. ![Frame from an FDA anti-smoking advertisement showing a teenager's skin peeling away](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/real-cost-your-skin-2014.png) *Frame from "Your Skin," The Real Cost campaign, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 4 February 2014. From the FRAME gallery: [The Real Cost — "Your Skin"](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/real-cost-your-skin-2014/)* - **Social media, left and right.** Posts attacking the other side outperform posts praising one's own side for liberal and conservative politicians and outlets alike [5], which gives every faction an incentive to lead with the enemy. This is the commercial logic behind [Outrage bait](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/outrage-bait/). ## How to spot it - The message opens with a threat, a loss or an enemy, and the positive case (if any) comes later or not at all. - A single negative incident is used to characterize a whole person, program or group. - Headlines or posts use more negative words than the story underneath supports. - The message says more about what the other side will do than about what the sender proposes. ## Persuasion or manipulation? Warning people about real dangers is legitimate, and negative information about a record can be relevant and useful to voters. Honest use states the size and likelihood of the harm, gives the evidence, and offers a path the audience can evaluate. It becomes manipulative when negativity is used to crowd out information: when a rare harm is dramatized with no sense of its probability, when one bad case is presented as typical, or when attention-grabbing hostility toward an out-group stands in for any argument. ## Archive techniques that lean on this - [Fear appeal](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/fear-appeal/) — Fear appeal: stages imminent harm, relying on the extra weight people give to threats. - [Outrage bait](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/outrage-bait/) — Outrage bait: builds content around a negative, often out-group-directed provocation because it spreads faster. ## Related topics - [Fear messaging](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/fear-messaging/) — Fear messaging - [Moral outrage](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/moral-outrage/) — Moral outrage - [Affect heuristic](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/affect-heuristic/) — Affect heuristic - [Availability heuristic](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/availability-heuristic/) — Availability heuristic - [Framing effect](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/framing-effect/) — Framing effect ## Sources 1. Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. *Review of General Psychology*, 5(4), 323–370. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323 2. Rozin, P., & Royzman, E. B. (2001). Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion. *Personality and Social Psychology Review*, 5(4), 296–320. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327957PSPR0504_2 3. Soroka, S., Fournier, P., & Nir, L. (2019). Cross-national evidence of a negativity bias in psychophysiological reactions to news. *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, 116(38), 18888–18892. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1908369116 4. Robertson, C. E., Pröllochs, N., Schwarzenegger, K., Pärnamets, P., Van Bavel, J. J., & Feuerriegel, S. (2023). Negativity drives online news consumption. *Nature Human Behaviour*, 7(5), 812–822. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01538-4 5. Rathje, S., Van Bavel, J. J., & van der Linden, S. (2021). Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media. *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, 118(26), e2024292118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2024292118 6. Lau, R. R., Sigelman, L., & Rovner, I. B. (2007). The effects of negative political campaigns: A meta-analytic reassessment. *Journal of Politics*, 69(4), 1176–1209. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2508.2007.00618.x 7. Hibbing, J. R., Smith, K. B., & Alford, J. R. (2014). Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology. *Behavioral and Brain Sciences*, 37(3), 297–307. 8. Bakker, B. N., Schumacher, G., Gothreau, C., & Arceneaux, K. (2020). Conservatives and liberals have similar physiological responses to threats. *Nature Human Behaviour*, 4(6), 613–621. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0823-z 9. Museum of the Moving Image. *The Living Room Candidate* (online archive of US presidential campaign commercials; 1964 Johnson "Daisy" and 1988 Bush "Revolving Door" entries). https://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1964/peace-little-girl-daisy and https://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1988/revolving-door ## Images | Image | Source | Licence | | --- | --- | --- | | *Destroy This Mad Brute* (1917) | FRAME gallery, [Destroy This Mad Brute — Enlist](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/destroy-this-mad-brute-1917/); Library of Congress LC-USZC4-4696 | Public domain (artist died 1937) | | *Was England will!* (1918) | FRAME gallery, [Was England will! (What England Wants!)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/was-england-will-1918/); Library of Congress LC-USZC4-12309 | Public domain (published before 1931) | | "Daisy" advertisement frame (1964) | FRAME gallery, [Peace, Little Girl ("Daisy")](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/daisy-ad-1964/) | Public domain (published without a copyright notice, per Wikimedia Commons) | | "Your Skin," The Real Cost (2014) | FRAME gallery, [The Real Cost — "Your Skin"](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/real-cost-your-skin-2014/) | Public domain (U.S. government work) | ### Image gaps Frames from the 1988 "Revolving Door" advertisement and screenshots of social-media posts were not verified as public domain or openly licensed, so they are cited, not hosted. ## Techniques [Fear appeal](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/fear-appeal/) [Outrage bait](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/outrage-bait/) ## Related - [Fear messaging](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/fear-messaging/) - [Moral outrage](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/moral-outrage/) - [Affect heuristic](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/affect-heuristic/) - [Availability heuristic](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/availability-heuristic/) - [Framing effect](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/framing-effect/) - [Fear appeal](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/fear-appeal/) - [Outrage bait](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/outrage-bait/)